I am taking a break from writing a paper on Waiting for Godot to present two small ideas that could be expanded into book-length treatises of staggering genius:
1-Symbolist drama, considered the beginning of the modern European avant-garde, was birthed at roughly the same time as modern realist theater. Both Emile Zola’s treatises on naturalism and Maurice Maeterlinck’s essays and plays were, if not contemporaneous, within a decade or so of each other. And yet, the practitioners of every modern avant-garde movement, beginning with Symbolism, have positioned themselves in opposition to the means and premises of the realist theater. Reading such arguments today, we are not puzzled. Realism has come to so dominate our own theatrical world that we are immediately in empathy with artists like Maeterlinck in their frustration with realism and naturalism. Looked at historically, however, it is puzzling that there should be such fury over a theory of the drama (realism) that was, at the time, only in swaddling clothes (as opposed to the Romantic refutation of neo-classicism, which were nearly two centuries apart from each other in their respective geneses).
I wonder if it is time to tell a new version of dramatic history in which the avant-garde does not rise up to replace realism but in which there was a great schism in the wake of Romanticism, by which dramatic history took two separate paths: Realism and Anti-Realism (or, the Avant-Garde). These two dramaturgical paths continue to be walked on, and while they interact and in many ways inform each other, they remain parallel. The history of theater since the end of the 19th century is a dialectical struggle between Realism and Anti-Realism that has yet to be resolved. Just a thought.
2-It occurs to me that the blog, in its insistence on separating thoughts and arguments into pieces that are not expected to make a whole, marks a resurgence of the Romantic idea of the fragment, by which universal “truths” are reached by small tick-tacks rather than massive swings of the ax. Just a thought.
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Although Elinor Fuchs (my professor of dramatic theory) is certainly not a reader of this blog, I shared my question about realism and Symbolism with her. I feel her response should be included as a comment:
"Jason, If you read Zola and read Maeterlinck, it's clear that they were both reacting against the French version of late romanticism and melodrama in the theater. In 1880 when Zola wrote what we read, he was still looking for the first naturalist play to reveal the "formula." I'm not sure they ever found it in France.
That the Symbolists were reacting against the coarse materialism of industrial society does not mean that they were reacting against Zola,
though they would no doubt have thought of this scientific method in depicting the "human spirit" as part of this same coarse materialism. In any event "realists," as in Ibsen, came a generation earlier. I think you're right about the two separate paths. But they were not equal paths. The realist path was for a popular audience; the "avant-garde" was intended for a small coterie audience, and that's all they found. Write your paper! Elinor"
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